The Khronos Group, the industry body that maintains OpenGL, OpenCL, EGL, glTF, Vulkan, OpenXR, and several other standards, has announced the Vulkan Safety Critical (SC) Working Group at Embedded World Conference 2019. The goal is to create an API that leverages Vulkan’s graphics and compute capabilities in a way that implementations can be safe and secure enough for the strictest of industries, such as automotive, air, medical, and energy.

It's a safety hammer, I promise. (No I don't.)

The primary goal is graphics and compute, although the working group will also consider exposing other hardware capabilities, such as video encode and decode. These industries currently have access to graphics through OpenGL SC, although the latest release is still significantly behind what a GPU can do. To put it into perspective – the latest OpenGL SC 2.0 (which was released in 2016) has less functionality than the original release of WebGL back in 2011.

While OpenGL SC 2.0 allows programmable vertex and fragment (pixel) shaders, it falls short in many areas. Most importantly, OpenGL SC 2.0 does not allow compute shaders; Vulkan SC is aiming to promote the GPU into a coprocessor for each of these important industries.

There is not much else to report on at this point – the working group has been formed. A bunch of industry members have voiced their excitement about the new API’s potential, such as Codeplay, Arm, and NVIDIA. The obvious example application would be self-driving cars, although I’m personally interested in the medical industry. Is there any sort of instrument that could do significantly more if it had access to a parallel compute device?

If you are in a safety-critical enterprise, then look into joining the Khronos Group.